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Alberta Premier Jason Kenney speaks to reporters after appearing at the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources about Bill C-69 at the Senate of Canada Building on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, May 2, 2019. Kenney says there are a number of factors, including climate change, that have contributed to the dire forest fire situation in northern Alberta over the past few weeks.Photo by Justin Tang/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

First, the good news.

The UCP government is following through on its campaign promise to spend $100 million over the next four years to improve mental health and addiction services, and an additional $40 million to specifically respond to the opioid crisis.

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This is a smart and bold investment at a time when the government is looking to restrain and even cut spending in almost every other area.

If correctly applied, the additional funding could have profound preventative effects, allowing professionals to catch and treat issues before they become serious problems. And that, in turn, should produce better outcomes for patients while simultaneously lowering long-term costs for the health system.

Unfortunately — and here’s the bad news — there is legitimate worry the UCP’s approach to this issue contains a significant hangup on supervised drug consumption sites that seems to be driven by personal ideology over evidence.

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As you may have heard, Alberta Health is planning a review of the province’s existing facilities, which includes four in Edmonton, one in Calgary, one in Lethbridge and a mobile site that started up three months ago in Grande Prairie.

In the meantime, sites that were nearing a launch point in Red Deer and Medicine Hat, along with a proposed mobile site in Calgary, are now on hold until the review is complete.

Exactly when they’ll be allowed to open their doors, if ever, is still unclear as there is currently no timeline for the review. Similarly, while we know the study will explore impacts on surrounding communities, it’s uncertain how deeply it will look at other factors such as how effective the sites are.

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On one hand, it is completely reasonable for a new government to want to study what has been a controversial change. And communities who feel they have been hurt need to be heard.

At the same time, something about this process feels predatory.

At least some of the site leaders are nervous about the underlying motivation of the review, and it’s hard to blame them given the rhetoric from UCP circles.

Premier Jason Kenney, for one, has denigrated the sites as venues to help people “inject poison” and “commit slow motion suicide,” while also asserting they have had “devastating” effects for surrounding neighbourhoods.

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Such overblown and insensitive commentary likely hasn’t played well beyond the UCP base, so the government has now adopted a new set of talking points.

Remarks from Luan, the premier’s director of communications and others this week have started to focus on the need for a “balanced” approach built around a “continuum of care,” while suggesting the NDP is hung up on the sites as the only solution to the opioid crisis — which is not an argument the NDP has ever made.

While more subtle, the effect of such language nonetheless undermines the importance of supervised consumption services. As such, it’s hard not to wonder if the government is laying groundwork for a review that will subject the sites to unfairly high standards to justify their existence.

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The Grande Prairie mobile site has so far had 1,670 visits from 120 different clients and has responded to 40 overdoses — and the facility has been open just 13 weeks.

Proposed facilities in Red Deer and Medicine Hat could see similar numbers of lives saved and people helped, and it would be a shame if they never got the opportunity.

Reducing or shutting down any of the existing facilities, which together saw nearly 220,000 visits and reversed more than 2,500 overdoses over the last year, would have even more tragic effects.

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“I don’t know how many lives we have to save to make it legitimate,” said Marliss Taylor, manager of Edmonton’s Streetworks needle program.

For me, the concern is not just the risk to the pending and existing sites, but in stymieing further progress.

The goal should be not just to have those facilities operating, but to expand them where appropriate — how about one near Whyte Avenue? — and to allow them to do more things.

This could include allowing sites to provide the injectable opioid drug hydromorphone to clients who struggle with traditional forms of opioid treatment.

It could include creating more temporary overdose prevention sites in rural areas or at big public events. Kenney wants people to have more free rein to walk around festivals with a beer, so why not allow a tent that would stop someone from overdosing?

Another concerning sign is that the province’s opioid commission hasn’t held a meeting since February, and a number of members say they have heard nothing about whether the government plans to keep it. Similarly, the province has yet to release anyreports on opioid deathsand responses in 2019.

Hopefully that will be corrected soon. In the meantime, Albertans are left to wonder if misguided ideology will turn the province’s otherwise good news story into a tragedy.